Bedser was really super fine/Fourteen wickets for ninety-nine/Alec Bedser, who taught you to bowl to Australia

Alec Bedser Calypso, Lord Kitchener.

You could set your watch by Big Al. At midday on the button, at any Test of the past few decades at Lord's or The Oval, a brace of identical giants would appear at the back of the press box or at the pavilion bar and summon an esteemed colleague for a pint. Then, for an hour, Alec Bedser and Eric (or was it the other way round?) would put the cricket world to rights. It was never less than engaging. And when Eric died a few years ago, and everyone expected Alec to follow suit and fade away with the emptiness of the loss of his inseparable twin, he seemed to flourish instead. Until ill-health began to make an impact, perhaps he sought the company of cricketers and cricket people even more.

It was impossible not to like Alec, with his old-fashioned cricket values and virtues, common sense and dry humour. There was a deal more to him than the stereotypical fellow who bowled a season's-worth before the end of May, wearing hand-me-down boots, before walking home each night to Woking. But the wisdom came on the back of thousands of overs, delivered faithfully and with such stout heart that it is a wonder that finally it has stopped beating. In an age of hyperbole few deserve the accolade "great", but he was one of the game's genuinely great cricketers, who for a while post‑war carried the England attack on his massive shoulders.

A colleague, as a gentle wind-up, once asked him whether he considered himself to be a strike bowler. Alec turned his head and looked out to the middle, to watch the enthusiastic fellow out there getting cut and carved to ribbons, and then answered. "Strike bowler?" he said. "I dunno. But I didn't run up like a twat and pitch it halfway down so I don't suppose I was." Of course he was a strike bowler, 236 wickets from 51 Tests at a shade under 25 apiece are testament to that.

Raw pace is not everything, although he was a deal quicker than many might imagine, and both Godfrey Evans and Arthur McIntyre, the brilliant keepers who at his request often (although not always) stood up to him, suffered hands bruised enough to prove that. He swung the ball sharply in to the right‑hander as his default delivery and then, for good measure, developed the most devastating, wicked leg‑cutter the game has seen as an alternative.

He was the first cricketer to make an impression on me. The eulogy from "Kitch", the marvellous calypsonian, commemorating one of Test cricket's outstanding bowling performances, at Trent Bridge in 1953, was often played scratchily on the radiogram in my grandparents' front room. I can still hum it today. Because of that, Alec was the first cricketer of whom I ever heard and, as I saw him play for Surrey at The Oval in 1959, the first county match I attended, one of the first I ever saw live, although he was 41 then and the gloom was gathering fast on his career.

Many years later, as chairman of the England selectors, he was to have a different impact on my own career.

Several years after that match at The Oval, I saw him bowl at the closest of quarters. The London commercial television channel regularly screened a live programme, Seeing Sport, a coaching series for children, and when cricket was involved it was broadcast from my school. Alec did his instructional stuff and was then asked to demonstrate that leg‑cutter, the delivery with which he had become synonymous. It was quite startling to see, a revelation not least to a young kid, pitching on leg stump before fizzing away and clipping the top of off. He once told me how he discovered it almost by accident during a searing day in Australia, when little was happening and his stock in-swinger was not functioning.

So he changed the seam position, tried accentuating his natural in-swing wrist action so that his massive sausage fingers ripped down the side of the ball, imparting spin. The ball gripped, nipped away and the legend was born. The delivery which baffled the Australian batsman Lindsay Hassett in that Nottingham Test was talked about in its day with the same reverence as Shane Warne's ball of the century to Mike Gatting. It remained a regret of Alec's that no one in recent times bothered to pick his brains on how to bowl that delivery, especially when there were dusty subcontinental pitches to consider.

Only once did I see him genuinely bemused. In the aftermath of an England tour to India, Alec bumped into his old Surrey chum Mickey Stewart who, as England's first manager, had not long since finished in the role. One opening bowler, Phil DeFreitas, had managed to go through the entire tour without taking a wicket in any cricket, a considerable feat. "So what about this DeFreitas then," wondered Alec. "What's the matter with him?" "Trouble is, Al, is that he bowls too many wicket-taking balls," said Stewart. "And how many wickets did he get again?" "None." Alec looked at Stewart, shook his big old head sadly, and wandered away. "I dunno," he was muttering, "I dunno."